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Does your toddler sometimes get their words a bit mixed up? It can be tempting to correct them, but they’re actually being incredibly clever. When they’re about three or four, most children start speaking in longer sentences. And at this age, they’ll make funny little ’s only natural. They’re so keen to speak to you that they’ll use anything in their language toolkit to get the message across!

They’re not getting it wrong, they’re cleverly using the words they do know to speak. And when it comes to increasing their language toolkit, there’s no-one more powerful than you! We know this because researchers analysed 300 hours of speech from three year olds and their mothers. They found that the children’s questions closely reflected questions they’d heard from their mums.And that’s just one example. Researchers also showed just how sensitive children are to the patterns in the language they hear.

Here’s how - they gave four year olds action-words, not real words like 'jump' or 'catch', but made-up action words, like ‘blib’. They then asked the children to add endings to the made-up words, to see if they would turn them in to words like ‘blibbing’ or ‘blibbed’. The study found that the children were much better at using endings that occur more frequently in their language than those that occur less frequently. But it just shows that children are very sensitive to patterns in the language they hear, and they learn them without knowing! So, there’s no need to correct your child or worry that they’re getting it wrong. Just keep talking to them! They’ll get there in the end!